A Gate at the Stairs

  When next I went to the Thornwood-Brinks’ it was Edward who again greeted me at the kitchen table. Did he not have the speed-dating of fruit flies to chaperone?

  He smiled at me in a warm and charming way that made me look behind me to see if someone else was there. No one was.

  “I wanted to let you know that the cleaning gay is coming today.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m sorry. He’s gay. He cleans. I call him the cleaning gay. Sarah yells at me for that. The cleaning guy. His name is Noel. Though he sometimes likes to be called Noelle. His vacuum cleaner used to frighten Emmie, but now she’s obsessed with it. He sometimes lets her push it around. That’s all OK.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “Is she napping now?”

  “She is,” he said. And gave me one of those smiles again, full of craggy warmth and intelligent twinkle. I turned around to see once more if someone was behind me. And then he left.

  When Noel came, noisily bursting through the back door with buckets of cleansers and sponges, I introduced myself.

  “Just call me Noelle,” he said of himself. “When I was little they used to call me Noel, Noel, the toilet bowl. Although now I have thought of painting that on the side of my van. It might be good for business? I don’t know.”

  “How long have you been working here?” I asked.

  “Too long,” he sighed. “Though I love Sarah. She’s fabulous.”

  “How about Monsieur?”

  He sighed and leaned on his mop. “Gay men don’t like straight men.”

  “Really?” I somehow doubted that.

  “Why should they?”

  I shrugged. “No reason.”

  “Little Emmie’s a doll, isn’t she? I’m so thrilled for Sarah. I hope they’ll get a swing set out back for her.”

  “That would be good,” I said.

  “Today’s my birthday,” he added.

  “Happy birthday. How old are you?” He looked somewhere in his thirties.

  “Sixty,” he said. “It’s a biggie.”

  “Well, you sure don’t look that!” Although even as I was saying it, beneath his dyed black hair I could see the leathery skin and rheumy eyes of age, or the fumes of harsh cleaning fluids, whichever it was.

  “Actually, it’s not my birthday.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I had read some Lewis Carroll—but clearly not enough.

  “I’m just trying that out—it is coming up, so I’m trying it out on people.” A test. Perhaps it was a test of me as well. Still, I thought we could be friends. There was a nice kind of upstairs-downstairs vibe I was getting from him—we two could be the downstairs. Or was it upstairs? We would be the back stairs.

  “Well, as I said, you don’t look sixty.”

  He flung his hands at me. “Oh, don’t say that! It makes me feel worse, like you’re lying. Look! Emmie!” I turned and there she was, having awoken, rashy-cheeked and tumbleheaded. She’d made her way over the crib rails, down the stairs, past all the gates.

  “Tassa!” she said, and ran and hugged my legs.

  In Sufism I continued to sit next to the Brazilian. WHAT THE HELL IS THIS PROF SAYING? he wrote to me.

  “He’s actually very smart,” I murmured back. “He’s talking about the four stages of the tariqa and their rituals. There’s a lot of piety, renunciation, and yearning for Paradise.”

  Then he leaned toward me and whispered, “I can see you don’t join that easily in complaining. That’s a good quality. But so is joining easily.”

  Walking out of the lecture hall he said to me, “Did you know it’s blackbird days—i giorni della merla?”

  “What is that? I’ve never heard of that.”

  He studied me for a moment. “It’s a celebration of the white blackbird who has taken refuge in the chimney, which blackens him with soot. It celebrates the soot.”

  “Interesting,” I said, thinking of Mary-Emma and other possible myths of the white blackbird.

  “It’s Brazilian,” he said.

  I nodded. My head filled with the renunciation of renunciation. And a yearning for yearning.

  I began to dress for him, relying mostly on a new gray-brown sweater dress I had bought in a boutique downtown with my new wages, a store where the clerks were chicly eager to help and where each item of apparel was in a color called Peat or Pumice or some such word. There were subtleties of neutral hue I’d never encountered before: Pebble, Pecan, Portabella, Peanut, Platinum, Porcelain, Pigeon, Parmesan, Pavement, Parchment, Pearl, and, ah, Potato. There were the brighter colors, too. One could recite them all like a jump-rope rhyme. Paprika. Pinot, Persimmon! Pimento! Pomegranate, Pine! Poplar, Pistachio, Peacock, Petal Pink, Polar Peach, Pumpkin, Pepper, Plum, Pineapple. Periwinkle, Peridot, Primrose, Palm, Pea, Poppy, Puce. My new dress was in a shade called Oyster, which was a lot like Fig Gray, I noticed, and which I called Stick, since it was the color of a stick. Growing up far from the sea, what did I know of oysters? It was the same hue as a muddy russet potato before the potato was hosed off. I felt it made my eyes dark and my hair shine, but maybe the color appealed because unlike so much else I owned it was not a yellowish shade of green that threw itself in with the natural tinge of my teeth. On days I wore the dress, along with my water bra, the Brazilian was friendlier. Soon, and after an unfortunate but not totally annihilating laundering, I was calling the dress “shtick.” Did he not know these were not my real breasts, or not really? Did guys even bother to want to know? Girls were walking around wearing these soft protrusions and guys were just going “Do-dee-do” like Homer Simpson. Perhaps when God said, “Let there be light,” in the original and correct Bible, still undiscovered, he also said, “Let there be do-dee-do.” Thank you, God.

  After class the Brazilian and I would walk out together. He was tall and long-limbed beside me, and my walking close to him, in matched stride with him, made me feel in possession of a prize. One time we made it all the way to a coffee shop, where I asked him whether he’d like to have coffee with me, and he said no.

  “Coals to Newcastle and all that,” I said, flustered. “Why would a Brazilian drink coffee in America—don’t know what I was thinking.” I turned to go.

  “I’d like a Coke,” he said.

  “OK,” I said. “They have Pepsi in there. Is that all right?”

  “OK,” he said. He had a smile that made you realize that some skulls contained an entire power plant set up in miniature inside, and the heat and electricity they generated spilled their voltage out through the teeth and eyes.

  “Teach me some Portuguese,” I said over coffee and cola at a back table near a table of zines and flyers.

  And what he taught me, phrases from little songs—Ahora voy a dormire, bambino, / Porque llevo el pijama: si! no! si! no!—I repeated and rehearsed at home and even taught Mary-Emma. They could have been Etruscan for all I knew. Negro, blanco, / Me gusta naranja! I learned much later it was actually Spanish with some Italian thrown in. Except for the words to “Happy Birthday,” none of it was Portuguese at all.

  Thus began my protracted misunderstanding of Romance languages (in high school I had taken German with Frau Zinkraub; on the tops of all my quizzes I drew pictures of Panzer tanks with Hitler on top in a salute; I had tried Latin, but in situ there had been no one to speak it with—and so what was the point? I would do things like imagine ergonomic meant “thereforeish”). Romance languages eluded me both generally and specifically; nothing was as cryptic and ripe for misunderstanding as the physical language of a boy’s love. What was an involuntary grimace I took to be rapture. What was a simple natural masculine compulsion to be in, to tunnel and thrust, I saw as a tender desire to be sweetly engulfed and at least momentarily overpowered by another’s devoted attentions. What was an urgent, automatic back-and-forth of the body I thought of as the eternal romantic return of the lover. Kissing was not animal appetite but the heart flying up to the lips and speaking its unique attraction and deep eternal fond
nesses in the only way it could. The juddering of climax, as involuntary as a death rattle, I took to be a statement of hopeless attachment. Why, I don’t know. I didn’t think of myself as sentimental. I thought of myself as spiritually alert.

  Uh-oh, as Mary-Emma would say.

  “Are you a virgin?” he had asked.

  “Yes,” I said. That he couldn’t tell already, that it wasn’t spelled out all over my face and demeanor, thrilled me. To be funny, I rolled my head with a harlot’s abandon and purred, “I am.” I fell back, the way a cooked onion slid apart, in all its layers, when bit.

  Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the insane tended to give off a palpable, vibrating allure, a kind of animal magnetism that kept them loved by someone. How else could they survive at all? Someone had to hide them from the authorities! Hence the necessity and prevalence of sex appeal for people who were wild and on the edge.

  If only I could have dated someone who was both insane and criminal. If only I could have dated the criminally insane! I could have doubled my fun and entered the purest, highest exhilarating erotic and narcotic trance! and if I’d lived to tell the tale, perhaps come to my senses sooner. I was in a fused condition of ecstasy and retrospective rue almost always, and from the beginning. “I love you,” I would say, and he said nothing at all. But no shame rose in me to rescue or silence me. “I love you,” I said again. And then I added, “Is there an echo in here?”

  “There is,” he would say, smiling. His teeth were the color of cream. His gums the pale lox pink of a winter tomato. He wore wrapped around his neck a black-and-white scarf—a print I thought of as Middle Eastern, though it could have been a Navajo tablecloth, for all I knew.

  “Yeah, I thought so.” I would tenderly smooth the strands of hair off my own face, myself.

  I had told Murph that I had a crush on a South American and while I was out she called from her boyfriend’s one night and sang into the phone machine: “Pedro Pedro bo bedro, banana fanna fo fedro, fee fie mo medro …”

  His name was Reynaldo, and as the snow melted, I began to bring Mary-Emma—in her Radio Flyer wagon or in her stroller—on walks to his apartment. To bring him a present—a doughnut or Danish or a hot mocha—I would stop in the market on the way there, in a section of town where there were actual black people shopping (unlike the Wednesday-night rumors of such). Some would look at me, then at Mary-Emma, and then at me again and smile. They seemed to be welcoming me into the community. Some would say hi to Mary-Emma. There were only a few bits of unpleasantness from women. Two black women and one white one scowled at me: I was a tramp. For some black women I clearly had encroached upon their men and produced this baby; besides, what did I know about bringing up an African-American child in this world? (Nothing.) To the white woman I was a whoring girl messing around with anyone. This was all said in looks, so the truth could not be uttered, but I saw again and again what it was simply to walk into a store for a doughnut and have a wordless racial experience.

  But mostly black people were smiling and warm to us. Everyone loved a beautiful baby, no matter what.

  “Hey, sweetie!” they said. And Mary-Emma would smile or hide her face in her own shoulder.

  Once, I thought I saw Sarah’s car following us, but when I turned saw nothing.

  When I brought Mary-Emma, Reynaldo and I did not kiss or touch at all in front of her, but often I returned to his place with her after having left his bed for work just that morning, wanting badly to see him again soon and right away. It was neither near nor far—one could get there in twenty-five minutes without much trouble, and when we arrived he was very kind to us both. He loved the doughnuts. He loved that particular mocha coffee. He was taking a photography class and took pictures of us with a new digital camera he had just bought—we said “cheese” in three languages, and then “keys” and then “please,” and when we were not paying attention he would suddenly sneak up and snap our picture from the side. Or freeze us in the frame, I should say. Digital cameras were still new, and seemed magical, as right in the moment he could have you look through the frames and say which picture you wanted. He made me some strong Brazilian morning tea, to last the whole day, and poured juice for Mary-Emma. She poked around and got into things, but he had a real xylophone, which he let her play, with both the soft cotton-dampened mallets and the harder wood ones with their zingier sound, and it all delighted her. She struck hard and with every note turned to look at me with amazement. “Here, let me show you,” Reynaldo would say, and he would take two sticks per hand and bounce them around on what I thought of as a double-decker keyboard. She seemed to love Reynaldo because he was attentive and appreciative, and perhaps because he was brown (the colorblindness of small children was a myth; she noticed difference and sameness, with almost equal interest; there was no “Dilemma of Difference” as my alliteration-loving professors occasionally put it; there was no “Sin of the Same”), but she also loved him because of that xylophone. He played the only American song he knew, a folk one with verse upon verse of wide water and longing and woe, one that ended “… like the summer dew.” And then he was very quiet, saying, “Shouldn’t it be ‘like the summer does’?”

  “Where have you been?” asked Sarah.

  “What do you mean?” There was something in her voice I’d not really heard before. I wondered if this was her restaurant voice. Not as sharp as the coulis-and-quenelles voice. But perhaps a beef-cheek-and-parsnip-gnocchi voice.

  “I was driving home and I saw you on Maple Avenue coming from what seemed quite far away. And Edward told me he’s seen you headed the other way, fast as can be, Emmie in the stroller and you just zipping along God knows where to.”

  “I’m sorry. Should I not take her for walks?”

  I’d never felt accused before. Perhaps I had never been accused before. I had, however, never been responsible for very much before, not really, and had little practice in having my actions observed and found lacking. Well, once, in ninth grade, I had tried out for cheerleading. But could that even count? When I went to fly into the air with one knee up, one leg back, one hand on my hip—a stag jump, it was called—I’d come down in a heap and the observing was quickly over.

  Sarah’s voice softened. “Oh, of course you should.” And then she seemed to let go of the topic entirely—just let it drop and skitter—and so I didn’t say any more on the matter right then.

  With my new money—Sarah had already given me a raise—I bought a used Suzuki 125 motor scooter, which I kept on the front porch and rode to classes or to Reynaldo’s, and a bedside reading lamp I ordered from a catalog. The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that that same man would have had to wear sunglasses. He would have had to set up a little pup tent on his side of the bed. The lamplight was as bright as the noon sun, and as I studied next to him, Reynaldo could not sleep. Yet another pretty picture of love I’d not questioned, just bought. I turned off the light and fell behind in my reading.

  It seemed now that the town had started to throw off the monochromatic winter to reveal its bright lunatic pajamas beneath. Though the robins had not yet reappeared, cardinals were whistling their mating songs. The remaining snowbanks were made dingy with rain. Only once did a late light snowfall blanket the town with a deathly quiet—a quick reminder before the winter left for good—an amuse-bouche, a mignardise, a déjà vu, a je reviens: I had dropped French long ago. Au printemps! The evaporating snow left the sky a lurid yellow at night. The streetlights shone off the remaining drifts, and for a few days all remained milky and low.

  But soon again the journey from crocus to daffodil to peony resumed. Flowers that intended to impress only bugs had accidentally enchanted not just me. Gardens began to emerge. Every third day there was a hot lemony sun,
with the lawns starting to green from rain and melted snow. The fraternity boys started to wear shorts and the siberian violets blued the yards. Still, you could sometimes see, in a shady north corner, a small black-flecked pile of snow so solid and condensed it could not melt. It was as if it had changed, biochemically, into a new substance, like the silica on Mars that was the tag end of some water or other.

  Wavy thickened tulip leaves had burst the beds and flopped down, still forming their tight bullety pods, but at an angle (only the largest tulips stayed straight, I said to Reynaldo, when kissing him; beneath him at night I was being taken to places so high and starry, I feared I was taking years off my life, the way astronauts are said not to live especially long). The early tulips were caught in leafy show, the petals still prayers sealed in a leprechaun’s clutch. St. Patrick’s Day came and went without even a single green beer to drink. My days were too busy and full, and without Murph—who seemed to have completely vanished except for the waxy smell of her unclean hairbrush still sitting there in the bathroom, along with her black dental floss and soap and an assortment of other items—what was the point of green beer?

  My strolls with Mary-Emma kept me alert to gardens and the softness of the air. The hyacinths, with their gravity-defying construction—fat botanical bumblebees with their look-Mom-I’m-flying paraphysics, which in the presence of actual gravity showed the botch of this ambition—soon bloomed and tipped. Clumps of daffodils huddled near trees, and spring phlox pinkened the hills of the park. What in June would be weeds and brush were now forsythia and the starry purple spikes of bachelor buttons (surely never worn by any bachelor ever). If I went up alleyways to better view other people’s backyards, and if I didn’t pay too much attention to the motley assemblages of trash cans, the alleys seemed like Irish lanes, or at least pictures I’d seen of country roads in Kerry. I’d contemplate the surreal dangle of the bleeding hearts or the columbine with their tiny eccentric lanterns in the most hardscrabble places—close to warm concrete—sprouting skyward and groundward simultaneously. If no one was looking I’d pick one for Mary-Emma. As with a snapdragon blossom you could turn one into a little talking puppet. There was a delicate hinge like a jaw, which you could squeeze open and shut. You could do little mocking imitations of your mother in the truck at the farmer’s market. You didn’t even need to be sitting in an actual truck to do it.